Science

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New sensing tech could help detect diseases, fraudulent art, chemical weapons

From airport security detecting explosives to art historians authenticating paintings, society's thirst for powerful sensors is growing.

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The technology (depicted above) consists of a thin film of silver or aluminum that acts as a mirror, and a dielectric layer of silica or alumina. The dielectric separates the mirror with tiny metal nanoparticles randomly spaced at the top of the substrate.

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Thin coating on condensers could make power plants more efficient: Graphene layer one atom thick could quadruple rate of condensation heat transfer in generating plants

ost of the world's electricity-producing power plants -- whether powered by coal, natural gas, or nuclear fission -- make electricity by generating steam that turns a turbine. That steam then is condensed back to water, and the cycle begins again.

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An uncoated copper condenser tube (top left) is shown next to a similar tube coated with graphene (top right). When exposed to water vapor at 100 degrees Celsius, the uncoated tube produces an inefficient water film (bottom left), while the coated shows the more desirable dropwise condensation (bottom right).

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Researchers synthesize magnetic nanoparticles that could offer alternative to rare Earth magnets

A team of scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University has synthesized a powerful new magnetic material that could reduce the dependence of the United States and other nations on rare earth elements produced by China.

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A transmission electron microscope image of the newly synthesized CoFe2C rods that contain an assembly of nanoparticles.

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Donuts, math, and superdense teleportation of quantum information

Putting a hole in the center of the donut--a mid-nineteenth-century invention--allows the deep-fried pastry to cook evenly, inside and out. As it turns out, the hole in the center of the donut also holds answers for a type of more efficient and reliable quantum information teleportation, a critical goal for quantum information science.

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In superdense teleportation of quantum information, Alice (near) selects a particular set of states to send to Bob (far), using the hyperentangled pair of photons they share. The possible states Alice may send are represented as the points on a donut shape, here artistically depicted in sharp relief from the cloudy silhouette of general quantum state that surrounds them. To transmit a state, Alice makes a measurement on her half of the entangled state, which has four possible outcomes shown by red, green, blue, and yellow points. She then communicates the outcome of her measurement (in this case, yellow, represented by the orange streak connecting the two donuts) to Bob using a classical information channel. Bob then can make a corrective rotation on his state to recover the state that Alice sent.

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OSU researchers prove magnetism can control heat, sound: Team leverages OSC services to help confirm, interpret experimental findings

Phonons--the elemental particles that transmit both heat and sound--have magnetic properties, according to a landmark study supported by Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) services and recently published by a researcher group from The Ohio State University.

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A team led by Ohio State's Wolfgang Windl, Ph.D., used OSC's Oakley Cluster to calculate acoustic phonon movement within an indium-antimonide semiconductor under a magnetic field. Their findings show that phonon amplitude-dependent magnetic moments are induced on the atoms, which change how they vibrate and transport heat.

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Production of Copper Cobaltite Nanocomposites with Photocatalytic Properties in Iran

Iranian researchers from Isfahan University produced a nanocomposite with application in the production of dye-sensitized photocatalysts.

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Controlled Release of Anticorrosive Materials in Spot by Nanocarriers

Iranian researchers designed polymeric nanocarriers with the capability to carry anticorrosive materials to metallic surfaces and prevent the corrosion of surfaces by releasing their contents in a controlled manner.

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DNA Double Helix Does Double Duty in Assembling Arrays of Nanoparticles: Synthetic pieces of biological molecule form framework and glue for making nanoparticle clusters and arrays

In a new twist on the use of DNA in nanoscale construction, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators put synthetic strands of the biological material to work in two ways: They used ropelike configurations of the DNA double helix to form a rigid geometrical framework, and added dangling pieces of single-stranded DNA to glue nanoparticles in place.

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Scientists built octahedrons using ropelike structures made of bundles of DNA double-helix molecules to form the frames (a). Single strands of DNA attached at the vertices (numbered in red) can be used to attach nanoparticles coated with complementary strands. This approach can yield a variety of structures, including ones with the same type of particle at each vertex (b), arrangements with particles placed only on certain vertices (c), and structures with different particles placed strategically on different vertices (d).

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Engineering Phase Changes in Nanoparticle Arrays: Scientists alter attractive and repulsive forces between DNA-linked particles to make dynamic, phase-shifting forms of nanomaterials

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have just taken a big step toward the goal of engineering dynamic nanomaterials whose structure and associated properties can be switched on demand. In a paper, they describe a way to selectively rearrange the nanoparticles in three-dimensional arrays to produce different configurations, or phases, from the same nano-components.

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Introducing "reprogramming" DNA strands into an already assembled nanoparticle array triggers a transition from a "mother phase," where particles occupy the corners and center of a cube (left), to a more compact "daughter phase" (right). The change represented in the schematic diagrams is revealed by the associated small-angle x-ray scattering patterns. Such phase-changes could potentially be used to switch a material's properties on demand.

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Basel physicists develop efficient method of signal transmission from nanocomponents

Physicists have developed an innovative method that could enable the efficient use of nanocomponents in electronic circuits. To achieve this, they have developed a layout in which a nanocomponent is connected to two electrical conductors, which uncouple the electrical signal in a highly efficient manner. The scientists at the Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel have published their results in the scientific journal Nature Communications together with their colleagues from ETH Zurich.

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The clever arrangement of two electrical conductors around the carbon nanotube leads to an efficient signal transmission between the carbon nanotube and a much larger conductor for electromagnetic waves.